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MAD AS HELL

If anger can be a form of honesty, it can also be wielded as a tool to achieve political aims. No one excelled more at this stratagem than Lyndon Baines Johnson. Here he is on a (taped) telephone call from the White House, more or less ordering Democratic Senator Abe Ribicoff to vote for a tax bill: “Goddamnit, you need to vote with me once in a while, just one time!” Deploying both an intimidating anger as well as, when it suited him, a cajoling charm, LBJ got Congress to enact a historic raft of Great Society programs.

Historians, though, worry that a politician’s anger—even if it’s merely used to appeal to voters—can indeed endanger our politics. Christie, with his proclivity for staged confrontations with constituents, registers to the Princeton presidential historian Fred Greenstein as “a loose cannon.” Greenstein, who has authored books on the leadership style of presidents from George Washington to Barack Obama, thinks unchecked combativeness in a leader can signal other important deficiencies. “The one thing you want in a president is emotional intelligence,” Greenstein adds. He had similar reservations about would-be president John McCain, possessed of a trademark bellicosity that sometimes seems to pit him against the world, or at least its leading rogues.

Of course few politicians could ever rival Richard Nixon—keeper of the notorious “enemies list”—in their propensity to let personal anger dictate decisions. Nixon, forever nursing a grudge at the East Coast establishment that he felt disrespected him, had a penchant for ill-advised policy adventures that seemed to be about, as much as anything, his need to show himself the equal of hated (and perhaps also envied) rivals like Nelson Rockefeller. His relentless bombing campaigns against Vietnam and Cambodia, while supposedly meant only to make him look like a madman, to get the enemy to relent, also suggest the frustrated wrath of a leader whose war policy wasn’t working. Likewise, it remains a debate for the ages whether “Give-em-hell Harry” Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan reflected, in part, anger, amplified by racial prejudice, at the country that had started the war with a sneak attack on America at Pearl Harbor. In his private life, the bourbon-swilling Truman was proudly, even flamboyantly, pugilistic. In response to a dismissive review in the Washington Post of his daughter Margaret’s singing performance at Constitution Hall, Truman, as president, wrote the offending critic: “Some day I hope to meet you. When that happens you'll need a new nose, a lot of beefsteak for black eyes, and perhaps a supporter below!” (Maybe this was overcompensation for a childhood when, “to tell the truth, I was kind of a sissy,” Truman once remarked, late in life. “If there was any danger of getting into a fight, I always ran.”)

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It is possible that Chris Christie’s brand of anger, employed to affect an everyman appeal, will gain a broader base of support than Elizabeth Warren’s more narrowly gauged variety. Her style—in contrast to the cool, laid-back Obama—has attracted an audience in the sizable portion of the Democratic base that views the president as insufficiently challenging of the one-percenters, the Wall Street bankers and others dining on lobster while the rest of America eats beans. With her bruiser rhetoric and fixed-glare bearing, Warren sounds and looks like she might just take a swing at Jamie Dimon. Or any silk-tie big banker. What makes her approach especially effective in galvanizing fans is her knack for comparing the treatment of “big people” vs. “little people” in America. “If you’re caught with an ounce of cocaine, the chances are good that you’ll go to jail,” she noted at a Senate banking hearing, incredulous at HSBC bank executives let off easy after admitting to providing financial services to Mexican narcotics traffickers. “But evidently, if you launder over a billion dollars for drug cartels,” she continued, “you go home to sleep in your own bed at night.”

Warren once taught Sunday school in a Methodist church in her native Oklahoma and her anger seems to draw on a deep well of prairie-nourished righteousness. She presents herself, William Jennings Bryan-like, as the receptive vessel of the legitimate grievances of the trod-upon. “One of my favorite passages of scripture is: ‘Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.’ Matthew 25:40,” she told her rapt audience at the Charlotte convention. She became a YouTube sensation, in the first place, with an extended and seemingly improvised riff, recorded at the home of a Massachusetts donor, targeting an unnamed “you” who built a factory and got rich with “hired workers the rest of us paid to educate.” With such performances Warren may succeed where Eliot Spitzer, whose similar tirades against Wall Street presaged her ascent, failed because of his personal character flaws. There can be little doubting her ambition—Barney Frank once told a “bemused” Obama, in Frank’s words, that Warren wanted his job. But is hers a politics of class warfare that, in the end, is too edgy to be politically winning with independent voters without whose support she can’t be a viable candidate for national office? Is she more interested in making politically advantageous enemies than in courting allies and thus too hot for her own good? In other words, can she get things done?

In her short time on the Hill, she sometimes seems more interested in staying true to her indignant persona than in getting behind policies that even most other Democrats support. After she attacked as insufficient a bipartisan compromise bill to cap interest rates on student loans, Majority Whip Dick Durbin of Illinois, known as a conciliator, pleaded with her, on the Senate floor, “Please, walking away from that doesn’t make sense.” But she didn’t stop walking—and ended up voting, with just 16 other Democrats, against the final bill, the terms of which she called “obscene.”

Elizabeth Warren addresses delegates during the second session of the Democratic National Convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, Sept. 5, 2012. | Jason Reed/Reuters

Standing apart from her Democratic Senate colleagues, as in this case, is probably a booster for Warren’s national profile. This week she landed on the cover of The New Republic and starred in a lavish profile touting her as an insurgent “liberal icon” at odds with the Democratic elite and nonetheless, possibly “Hillary’s nightmare.” That may overstate matters, both because Warren is still untested on the national political scene—what garners raves on MoveOn.org doesn’t necessarily win over Virginia and Ohio—and because Clinton has plenty of time to calibrate a message and a policy agenda designed to appeal to Democratic voters angry about issues like economic injustice.

In any case, that anger on the left is apt to exert a powerful influence on the contest for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination. “The reason that so many grassrooters respond to Warren is that she doesn’t pull her punches,” says Roger Hickey, co-director of the Campaign for America’s Future, a liberal advocacy group. The approach contrasts with the tactics employed by Hillary Clinton and her husband Bill who “came out of a period where they were the modulated Democrats,” Hickey notes, “always lecturing Democrats on the need to be more moderate.” He worries now that Democrats of Hillary’s stripe could be upstaged by a Republican—somebody perhaps of Christie’s ilk, in closer touch with the public’s stormy mood. “There’s a legitimate anger at the lousy performance of the economic system and if the Democratic Party doesn’t respond to that anger, then it fuels right-wing populism,” Hickey says.

Populism, fueled by grassroots anger, has often been a powerful force in American life, as in 19th-century efforts to regulate the railroads that were crushing the fortunes of small farmers. In that sense, anger can work, but only if political leaders are able to harness its potent energy. The scorching “man of the people” has nearly always been just that in America—a man. A quarrelsome male might be called a bully, as Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) is discovering (though not so much Kentucky’s Rand Paul, who is a softer stylistic presence), whereas the labels for the incensed female tend to be harsher, as in the Middle-English vintage epitaph ‘shrew.’ But that stereotype surely stands to be broken in the 21st century—“I am woman, hear me roar,” is apt to be politically actualized, if not by Warren than by someone else of her gender. The prototype comes from across the pond in the formidable personage of Margaret Thatcher, who took the mallet to all manner of barnacle-encrusted British institutions and habits. In a memoir, Gillian Shephard, the conservative English politician, described the “Iron Lady,” behind closed doors, as given to tantrums and shouting matches (and sometimes tears), with an “inimical hostility to those she considered her enemies.” Her anger as expressed in public, though, had a loftier aspect—it registered, calculated or not, as the moralistic rage of a British patriot who felt ardently that her beloved land was being hollowed out and betrayed by narrow, selfish interests with no care for the national good.

America could well profit from that sort of cosmic, socially purposed anger—whether the instrument is female or male, conservative or liberal. After all, it seems abundantly appropriate for ordinary people to be pissed off about a stalemated Washington and a stacked-deck economy. But such a leader may be too much to hope for. The country may already be so bitterly divided along partisan lines that we might witness the rise of a number of angry populists in both established parties (and maybe a third, Tea Partyish one), catering to the selective grievances of their respective adherents. And that suggests greater fragmentation and unruliness than exists now. Chris Christie and Elizabeth Warren are each, in their distinctive fashions, in tune with an angry citizenry—which is why they are now having their moments. Yet at the same time their fortunes seem captive to a public mood rooted in circumstances that can change. As of today, some, even many, like it hot. And tomorrow?

Paul Starobin is the author of After America: Narratives for the Next Global Age. A former Washingtonian, he lives now in Massachusetts.

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified Abe Ribicoff as a Republican; he was a Democrat.